Modern Journey to the West

The prints include small cartouches labelling the personae (the term 'persona' is used throughout, to avoid confusion with the term 'character', which is used to mean

• 玄奘 三藏 - Genjō-sanzō - The monk Xuanzang (Xuanzang-sanzang in Chinese - the second part of the name literally means "Three Baskets [of Buddhist teaching]"); he is drawn as a younger monk, with a mark on this forehead, often astride a horse (see below)
• 孫悟空 - Son Gokū - The Monkey God or Monkey King (Sun Wukong in Chinese); the most intelligent and powerful of the companions, he is always drawn as a monkey
• 豬 八戒 - Cho Hakkai - Pigsy (Zhu Bajie in Chinese - literally, "Eight-Precepts Pig" or "Pig of the Eight Prohibitions"); he is always drawn as a pig (although the shape of his snout looks more like an alligator than that of a modern farm pig)
• 沙 悟淨 - Sa Gojō - Sandy or Friar Sand (Sha Wujing in Chinese - literally, "Sand Awakened to Purity"); he is drawn as an old monk
• 玉龍三太子 - ? - The Third Prince of the Dragon-King (Yulong Santaizi in Chinese); usually drawn as a white horse, ridden by Genjō-sanzō

• Dates: 1864 (10) - 1865 (8)
• Size: Ōban
• Signed: Ikkaisai Yoshitoshi
• Publisher: Fukuta

Prints 1–9 follow Keyes; later entries retain the source page’s extensions. The prints themselves are unnumbered.

The only known attempt to enumerate this series is in Keyes' thesis:

	Roger. S. Keyes, "Courage and Silence: A Study of the Life and
		Color Woodblock Prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892",
		Cinncinnati, 1982

Keyes listed 9 prints in the series; we have probably found an additional 12 prints, making 21 in total. (The uncertainty is because is a slight question about one of the prints that Keyes lists; if the one we have for that one is not the one we think it is, we will have found 13 additional prints.) We use the Keyes numbers for the first 9, and have numbered the rest in the order of their dates, as Keyes did for the first nine.

The prints in the series do not appear to have any titles, or have numbers on them, or otherwise be in any explicit order. Japanese museums which have prints on display from this series do not show titles for the prints, merely list the personae which are labelled in each image. The 'Journey to the West' has 100 chapters, but Yoshitoshi does not seem to have set out to produce one print per chapter. In particular, at least of one the images is from quite late in the story. Also, although the row of characters on the left hand roll of the scroll-shaped title cartouche appears to be something like a chapter name, for each 'chapter name', several prints bear the same string of characters.

This page (and list) is not necessarily complete; the series is not well documented, and there may be yet other prints which have not yet come to our attention. However, given that the Museum of Fine Arts collection contains two almost-complete sets of this series, covering the same 21 prints as we had already found, the probability that there are large numbers of prints still missing is essentially nil. There may still be a small number undiscovered, but that would be the limit.

If you know of any prints from this series which aren't listed here, or have either i) information about any errors on the page, ii) better images than the ones below, or iii) missing information about individual prints (e.g. publisher, exact date) please let us know.

A title and contents sheet lists the twenty-one narrative subjects. It is displayed first here, without changing the existing print numbers.